Eileen Harvala publishes a report on a new game under development in a University of Minnesota College of Science & Engineering bulletin:
Metal-organic frameworks are a new class of nano-materials that are useful for a variety of safety, filtering, and manufacturing tasks. They are porous crystalline materials made by inorganic and organic units linked together by strong bonds. Because they have high levels of thermal and chemical stability, MOFs have important applications such as gas storage, catalysis of organic reactions, activation of small molecules, gas adsorption and separation (air purification), biomedical imaging, and proton, electron and ion conduction.
In phase one, the building phase of the game, each player is tasked with designing MOFs that block or adsorb as much harmful gas—carbon dioxide (CO2)—as possible, while allowing harmless or even helpful gases—nitrogen (N2)—to pass through as freely as possible. Each player is given a canvas of 3 by 3 unit cells, and can use the game’s building block library and available budget to buy different building blocks to create structures that will form an important defense matrix for the action phase of the game. Once the player feels that the defense matrix is ready, preliminary chemical calculations are performed to prepare some of the parameters for the action phase of the game.
During the action phase of the game, a wave of asteroids (CO2 molecules) and supplies (N2 molecules) drops from the sky and hits the defense matrix. While the objects are in the matrix, a real-time simulation of the underlying chemical structures is used to determine whether the supplies and asteroids are destroyed or pass through the defense matrix. The asteroids and supplies that pass through land on the player’s world unless destroyed by the player’s-controlled laser cannon. Each asteroid (CO2 molecule) that lands decreases the player’s health and each successful supply drop (N2 molecule) increases it. The player must remain healthy and save his or her world. The higher the player’s score, the better the chemical properties and filtering aspect of the created MOF. If successful, the player moves on to the next wave.
Sounds interesting, and an interesting way to gather up optimization strategies. Unfortunately, it appears that the game is only currently in release for Win64 platforms – I have a VirtualBox running Win32, so that won’t work, and I cannot provide a review of the game. Perhaps my Arts Editor’s laptop is Win64, I’ll have to check. For readers interested but too shy to click the above link, here’s the link in the article. And here’s the how-to video.
